Pine Point 
 

      Coming from the east, the first thing you saw in Pine Point was the orange-rusted cannon that sat beside the old schoolhouse. A dignified relic with an apparent air of the Old West, almost nobody stopped long enough to read the plaque and wonder what a Civil War cannon was doing halfway between the California coast and Nowhere. Further past the schoolhouse, a long deck, sunken in the middle like an old mattress and covered on top by a murky green overhang, ran the length of a mesh-screened snack shop, a dark tavern, and a bed and breakfast ambitious in its two stories and the unlit “No Vacancy” sign by the door. An army of tightly packed trees was all that lay beyond the gas station on the other side of the inn.

      The ghost town nipped the heel of a strip of highway that hastened to curve away from the tiny collection of buildings as fast as it dipped into them; Pine Point was no more than a blur in the rear-view mirrors of the solitary cars and trucks that would occasionally rush by and shake the window panes of Gertie & Ed’s Old Fashioned B&B. Even Adam, gazing fixedly at his feet as they kicked up dust on the other side of the road, would have missed the town entirely had he not nearly walked into the lone street sign: Grand Avenue.

      Adam squinted up at the bold words, yellowed with age, and then cast his eyes along the pathetic band of establishments, lingering uneasily on the gas station eighty yards away. He pursed his lips and pushed his fists deeper into the pockets of his Yankees jacket as he looked both ways and rambled across the highway.

      “Hi there, guy! Can I help you?”

      Adam hesitated just beyond the open door of the tavern, not sure whether or not he wanted to turn around. The owner of the gravelly voice waited as the stranger neither reappeared in the doorway nor resumed his slow trek across the creaking dark wood floorboards of the deck outside.

      “Yeah, you there! You lookin’ for something?”

      “Me?” Adam took a few steps back and thought for a moment. “No, not really.”

      “Lookin’ for someone?” The old barman flipped a rag over his shoulder.

      “Nope.”

      “Well then, guy, if you aren’t in any rush, how about takin’ a load off here and having a drink in a gen-u-ine vestige of the Old West?” The barman straightened as he recited the oft-practiced words he had once come across in a Gold Country guidebook.

      “I guess…why not?” Adam said, rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand and scanning the room. The walls were plastered with old “WANTED” posters and two-dollar bills and advertisements for jobs working saloons and digging in the mines. He sat down on the worn wooden barstool and inhaled the musty air.

      “You sure you aren’t lookin’ for something? We don’t get many people just stopping by for the heck of it around here,” the barman said as he handed Adam a Sierra Nevada.

      “How long have you lived here?” Adam asked idly.

      “Hmm…Good thirty years, I think. Used to live just up the road in Jacksonville.” The barman looked to be about seventy; thirty years ago, he would have been around Adam’s age. Adam tried to imagine arriving in Pine Point, a place too small to even be called a town, really, and deciding to spend the rest of his life there.

      “Are you married?”

      “Was thirty years ago,” the old man started wiping the bar again.

      “What happened?”

      “Just got tired, I guess,” he paused and furrowed his brow, as if he hadn’t really thought about it until Adam had asked. “Wanted something different. Adventure. Something new. ‘S why I came here.”

      Adam searched for a hint of irony in the barman’s voice and, not finding any, paid for the half-drunken bottle of beer and wandered back outside.

*  *  *

      About a month ago, Adam got off the subway after work and slowly, mechanically allowed his feet to plod on past his own turnoff. He let himself be swallowed by the crowds on Broadway, swept away with the ebb and flow of New York City.

      As he felt himself disappear like a grain of sand in a shoreline, he thought about the conversation he’d had with Lydia that morning and yesterday morning and the morning before that. How did you sleep, Adam? Fine, thanks. Your coffee should be ready in just a minute. Great. I have a meeting with my publisher this afternoon, so I’ll have to put Lisa in day care. Okay. Are you really wearing that tie? Yep. Here’s your coffee. Thanks. Have a good day at work!

      And then there was the conversation he’d had after work. How was the office, Adam? Fine, thanks. We’re having chicken tonight. Great…

      As he kept walking, the sky grew dimmer and dimmer and the crowds began to thin and he started feeling tired and rather silly wandering aimlessly through the city streets wearing his good gray suit and his good black shoes and carrying his good leather briefcase. At some point he stopped and turned around and found himself back at his doorstep, fidgeting guiltily like a little boy coming home after running off from his parents. When Lydia asked why he was late, he told her he had been mugged.

*  *  *

      Loitering on the deck outside the tavern, Adam felt the impulse to keep walking return to his legs. Lydia was probably reading “In the Night Kitchen” to Lisa the mile or so back where Adam had begun his trek, where the faulty gas gauge had left them stranded on the side of the road, out of fuel without even having realized it. Goddamn rentals, he had thought as he set off to buy a can of gas from wherever he could find it along that Godforsaken stretch of highway. Lydia gave him a kiss and told him to hurry.

      Now, dragging his feet toward the gas station, he could just see it, the way it could all play out. He saw himself buying the fuel and walking back along the dusty side of the road. He heard Lisa’s cry when she saw him coming, felt Lydia’s arms around him, his hands on the steering wheel. He watched as if from above the three of them pulling up to Lydia’s sister’s wedding just as she began her walk down the aisle, perfect timing, like a movie. It would all be so easy, in a way. It was what he was supposed to do, and something within him willed him to do it, that kind of internal centripetal force that keeps you cycling round the path of routine and meeting expectations. But his feet wanted to keep moving straight ahead.

      Circling the gas station, Adam couldn’t help but wonder what the kid he used to be would think of the man who was now trudging through a musty dusty Population: 8 town that probably wasn’t the size of a pinhead on a roadmap. He remembered being seventeen and sitting in the shadows of the abandoned subway station that Jack Santini’s older brother had discovered and passed on to the younger Santini’s pack of buddies when he left for college. There Adam and his friends would pass their listless Sunday afternoons smoking shitty joints and drinking cheap, shitty beers and alternately feeding the rats with whom they shared the sacred space and tossing them onto the tracks to be crushed by oncoming trains. Every once and a while they would creep off the platform and onto the emergency ledge beside the track and wait for a train to go by. They reveled in the rush of wind that sucked their entire bodies forward, blew their faces past all feeling, drew the breath out of their lungs. The thunderous crash of the train rumbling over the tracks and the shiny steel racing three inches in front of their noses took full possession of them; for a blissful moment every thought left their heads and all they could do was feel the cold sweat on their backs and the numb grip of their hands holding them safely against the wall of the tunnel.

      When the train was gone, the station would be swallowed in a tremulous stillness. The boys would steal back onto the platform wordlessly, the silence broken only by the sound of their hearts beating in their ears.

      And where was he now? Pacing back and forth in front of a gas station in a town that barely existed, Adam couldn’t pinpoint when he had lost the desire for pure, pointless adrenaline that had once enticed him onto the emergency ledge of a condemned subway station. The seventeen-year-old that Adam once saw in the mirror would spit with disgust if he could see the man he was to become.

      “Do you need something? You’ve been walking back and forth in front of me for a while now, and I was just wondering if you needed anything,” the gas station attendant croaked cantankerously from her booth. She put down her magazine to reveal a sad and severe face that Adam could tell had relented to the pull of gravity early in life. Hers wisps of thin gray hair had been twisted into a thin gray bun that sat like a pancake on the back of her head.

      “Uh, yeah. Well, maybe. Can I just…I need a minute,” Adam swallowed.

      “Whatever you want, Mister,” the attendant said. “But this isn’t a McDonald’s. People usually need gas or they don’t; it isn’t like deciding whether or not they want fries with their burger.”

      Adam raised his eyebrows. “Are you in some sort of hurry?” The heavyset woman looked so thoroughly ensconced in her booth that Adam imagined she had grown roots there. She cleared her throat with a disgruntled “harrumph.”

      “I’m just saying there isn’t much too think about, is all. Ya know, I came here to get away from all you uppity city-types,” she said, acknowledging his jacket. “But I guess you can’t really do that nowadays. It all just follows you. I guess some peace and courtesy is just too much to ask for anymore.”

      Adam gave the gas station attendant a sidelong glance, wondering exactly how courteous she thought she was being to him, and wandered back along the strip of buildings, sliding quickly past the tavern so the friendly barman wouldn’t see him. His feet led him to the snack shop, where he tried to distract himself by running his fingers over giant spiral lollipops and crinkly bags of “Westward Ho! Golden Pretzels.”

      It wasn’t that he hated Lydia, like some of his friends hated their wives after their children were born. He didn’t hate her at all. He just didn’t feel anything anymore. It wasn’t a sentiment with any heat behind it, but, he supposed, that was the problem. The absence of emotion, of caring, of…anything. He didn’t want to hurt her; he just wanted to move forward without her, and have her move forward without him. It was that simple. He didn’t want to take any money. He didn’t want to look her in the eye and tell her he was leaving. He didn’t want to buy a plane ticket. All of that would have been too aggressive, too much like betrayal, and he didn’t want to betray her. He just wanted to walk. And how could you really hurt someone by just walking?

      Adam paused and dug his hand into a barrel of cellophane-wrapped caramel candies. What was he thinking? He had everything – a loving wife and daughter, a great salary, and a great apartment in a great city. It was what all of his single friends were looking for, what his parents had always wanted for him, and what he supposed he had always wanted for himself. Still, somewhere along the way he had realized the inevitable – that the perfect life wasn’t as perfect as it appeared from the outside – and it had started to seem simultaneously impossible to stay and impossible to go. Even as it grew harder and harder to close his eyes to how dead everything seemed, how meaningless every conversation and how tired every interaction, he clung the safety and familiarity it provided. Even as he struggled against the confinement and inanity of it all, he could never find anything definitively unbearable to force him to leave.

      “You gonna buy something?” the mustached man behind the counter asked, leaning against the mop he had been ready to put to use when Adam had walked through the door.

      “I don’t know. Maybe,” Adam replied.

      “You’ve been dragging your feet around my shop a good fifteen minutes now; you wanna make up your mind?” the man said. “You’re either hungry or your aren’t.”

      Adam bit the side of his cheek and picked up an apple.

      “Thanks.” Adam payed the man with the mop and went outside to sit on the edge of the deck, his feet planted wide apart on the ground below.

      Screw it, he thought dully. Just screw it. So what if he didn’t know if he wanted to buy gas? So what if he didn’t know if he wanted to buy food? What was the rush? Why were these people always pushing him, telling him how simple everything was? They were just a bunch of townies who had left real life and real decisions to hide in the kitsch and scraps of the Old West. They probably weren’t even real scraps. It probably wasn’t even ever a real boomtown. It was probably always just this – this empty, nothing stop on the side of the road where someone settled only to realize that there wasn’t any gold here at all and left just as quickly as he came. This place was probably abandoned almost before it was inhabited. Fucking empty, nothing, deserted nowhere, that’s where they were all living.

      Elbows on his knees, Adam curled his toes in his shoes and clenched his teeth and tossed the apple back and forth from palm to palm. He liked how it felt, smooth and cool in his hands, just the right size for his grip and perfectly round. He let the gentle exercise soothe his irritation. After a few minutes, Adam stopped and stood up. He looked past the gas station, his bearing suddenly firm, resolute. He gazed intently into the trees and sucked his teeth.

                  * * *

      Coming from the west, Adam squeezed his eyes shut and his knuckles strained white against the apple in one hand, the can of gas in the other, as the rental car came into view and Lydia waved eagerly from the side of the road.